1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to systems for printing documents and electronic mail located on the Internet or an intranet. In particular, the present invention concerns systems for printing using a Universal Resource Locator (URL) corresponding to a document or using electronic mailbox information corresponding to electronic mail.
2. Description of the Related Art
The Internet contains many documents available for downloading to a user's computer. To access these documents, a user activates a web browser application residing on the computer and browses the World Wide Web through selection of hyperlinks within accessed web pages and/or by inputting specific URLs into the web browser. Once a desired document is found, the user selects the document and the document is downloaded to the user's computer for printing.
Such documents are downloaded in a particular format, such as Adobe PDF, Adobe Postscript, Microsoft Word, or the like. In order to print the downloaded document, the user opens the document in its associated application and prints the document from the application.
Recently, Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) has been developed to provide a system for printing by reference to a document's corresponding URL. Using IPP, a URL is delivered from an IPP client (usually executing on the user's computer) to an IPP server (usually executing on a web server). Next, the IPP server retrieves a document corresponding to the received URL and, if necessary, renders the document into an appropriate printer format. The print-ready document is then delivered to a printer for printing. One advantage of this print-by-reference functionality is that a user can retrieve and print a document without having first to access the website in which the document exists.
One drawback of the foregoing IPP scheme is that both the user's computer and the web server require special IPP-enabling-software to execute the IPP client and IPP server, respectively. However, many devices, such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) have limited processing power and application storage space, therefore the IPP scheme unacceptably consumes already scarce resources. Moreover, the IPP client software most likely includes an interface for inputting the URL and therefore requires a user to learn an interface in addition to those already used by the user.
Another drawback of the foregoing systems for printing arises because some websites containing printable documents are only accessible using certain transfer protocols, such as File Transfer Protocol (FTP). As a result, using the first system described above, a web browser searching for Internet/intranet-located documents must be FTP-enabled, that is, the browser must be able to communicate using the FTP protocol. Again, for devices having scarce memory, such a browser, which also supports Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), consumes more memory and computing power than a browser supporting only one protocol.
Yet another drawback of the foregoing systems is that printable documents are often difficult to locate on Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) web pages browsed by a user, since many web pages contain visually distracting colors, images and animations.
Accordingly, what is needed is a system allowing print-by-reference functionality utilizing commonly-available software applications and a system in which print-by-reference functionality can be used to print documents located on websites supporting a transfer protocol which is not supported by a user's browser. In addition, what is needed is a system in which printable documents on remote websites are presented to a user in an easily-understandable format.